The Interior Ministry
is refusing to explain the means by which it determines whether or not Orthodox
converts who converted abroad are eligible to make aliya.

“ITIM plans to reach
out to the Knesset to investigate the outrageous behavior of the Interior
Ministry and we also plan to ask the government to publish the criteria they
are working with, in accordance with the Freedom of Information law,” Rabbi
Seth Farber said. “This will be a first step in approaching the Supreme Court
once again over this matter.”

“If the government
acknowledges that it is operating based on a draft, and it won’t publish that
draft, then what are Orthodox converts supposed to do?” Interior Minister Eli
Yishai refused a request by the Post to comment.

Chabad
Hasidim, Hasidim affiliated with the Eda Haredit, and especially the Toldot
Aharon Hasidic sect are the most scrupulous of all.

Shmuel Pappenheim, a former
spokesman for the Eda Haredit, explains just how far the limits of strictness
reach: "At Passover," he says, "it is customary not to visit and
not to host people, except for close family members, of course, because no one
will eat at anyone else's home."

One needn’t be a
detective to crunch the numbers. If the IDF reports that it has purchased
25,000 liters of grape juice and each soldier is mandated by Jewish law to have
four cups of the sweet drink, then anybody can come up with a fair idea of how
many soldiers the IDF has kept on base during the night of the Passover seder.

The arithmetic regarding the 155,000 pounds of matzo — based on, say, two
pieces per meal, per soldier — might provide similar results.

Infantry troops
looking forward to a festive Passover meal had to make do with cold food
because of a disagreement between their cook and a religious supervisor in
charge of enforcing Jewish dietary laws, in an incident that drew complaints
from soldiers and attention from local media.

According to the
survey, 56% of the Israeli public believes that the law is needed both for the
Jewish character of the State (34%) and in order to maintain the status quo
between the religious and secular citizens of Israel (22%).

In contrast, 42%
believe the law is redundant: Some think "it needs to be a social norm
that stems from mutual respect (24%) while others believe the individual's
freedom must be respected and that chametz should be allowed on Passover (19%).

Some 61% of
respondents declared that they would be having a full-fledged seder with all
the trimmings (with the majority of this group made up of traditional and
religious Israelis).

Some 33% said they
would have a festive family dinner during which parts of the Haggadah would be
read (secular Israelis).

In Tel Aviv, about 950 businesses keep kosher
year-round. Rabbi Shimon Baluka, director of the Tel Aviv-Yafo Rabbinate’s
kosher department, says the Passover rules are so tough that only a third of
the kosher businesses take the trouble to get certified. The others close for
the holiday.

Besides the pre-Passover inspection, about 100
supervisors will ensure kosher restaurants stay to the rules during the
holiday, Baluka said.

According to Major Rabbi Asher Landau, the head
of the kashrut department in the IDF rabbinate, the IDF’s Passover purchases
are tremendous and they include: 220,000 pounds of matzo meal, 155,000 pounds
of matzo, 7,500 pounds of meat for brisket, 25,000 liters of grape juice (there
will be no wine whatsoever), 20,000 pounds of marble cake and some 30,000
pounds of powered kneidelach mix.

As the
country's new immigrants prepare to mark their first Passover in Israel as
Israeli citizens, many English-speaking olim are sorting through a range of
thoughts and emotions - from wide-eyed exuberance and national pride to studied
reflection.

Israel and Zionism
should be at the core of our Passover observance. The Exodus from Egypt had a
goal not just of freedom for the Jewish People but a return to our own land,
our own sovereignty, and our own Jewish ways of living.

We are required to make
the story meaningful for every generation; hence we should be asking four
important questions about Israel and considering four kinds of Zionists.

The author is a member of Knesset, an ordained
rabbi, and the founder and chairman of the Am Shalem movement.

Citizens have a difficult time with the stringent
and extreme rabbinate when trying to arrange the most basic life-cycle events.

Women feel intimidated when they walk in certain parts of the country. Men are
serving more army reserve time than necessary.

Families are paying more than
their equal share of taxes while supporting tens of thousands who should be
sharing the tax burden. Secular Israelis feel the state slipping out of their
hands and they are in panic mode.

The
problem is that every detour further illustrates the religious monopoly; every
time we let slide the blatant powers of religious coercion, we give the rabbis
more control.

What appears to be dizzying freedom is therefore nothing more
than weakness and surrender. And just as secular people have given up their
freedom to define the state's Jewish character, religious people have given up
the freedom to bring halakha up to date.

State planning authorities must examine plans to
expand the women’s section at the Western Wall as part of reconstructions of
the Mughrabi Bridge, and must take into consideration security issues, the
Supreme Court ruled on Tuesday.

The panel of justices Miriam Naor, Esther Hayut
and Neal Handel said that the national planning council’s appeals subcommittee
had been wrong when it found that expanding the women’s section had been removed
from the agenda, since the regional planning committee had explicitly endorsed
it.

Naor said that the appeals subcommittee had in
any case not discussed the matter, and so returned the issue to them to make a
decision on the issue of expanding the plaza.

Anat Hoffman, chairwoman of the Women of the
Wall, “There should be access to the Western Wall for everyone, and we should
stop acting as if the Western Wall is an Orthodox synagogue...”

Police arrested the
head of Jerusalem-based humanitarian aid network Hazon Yeshaya, a charity that
provides thousands of hot meals each day to people in need, and nine of the
organization’s employees Sunday on suspicion of pocketing millions of dollars
from donors abroad for poor people, including Holocaust victims.

According to
suspicions, the association which was supposed to supply food to elderly
survivors purchased dozens of tons of food, but instead of giving it out, sold
the food for profit. The investigation led police to arrest several association
employees and their contacts.

Police
have asked the attorney general to shut down the ultra-Orthodox news website
Behadrei Haredim, several of whose executives and editors are accused of
extorting large sums of money from public figures in exchange for not
publishing damaging information on them.

The Meretz party on Wednesday motioned the High
Court of Justice to order the Transportation Ministry to accede to a request
for buses to run in Tel Aviv on Shabbat. The rub is that, according to ministry
officials, no such request was ever made by the Tel Aviv municipality.

The city confirms that but says the request is
in process and will be made.

Meretz MK Horwowitz
added that the resolution by the Tel Aviv Municipality regarding public
transport on Shabbat was a “historic decision.”

He accused the
transportation minister of surrendering to religious coercion and “hiding
behind the hollow facade of the ‘status quo.’”

“The government is mistreating
the large segment of the public who do not have a car, who cannot drive or who
do not want to pay for fuel and parking, and who would like public
transportation, all because of ancient arrangements with ultra-Orthodox
parties, which are now obsolete,” Horowitz added.

The bill, introduced by a women’s organization in
an attempt to force the religious courts to uphold the laws of the land and not
just halacha (a tricky proposition at best) has been watered down.

While
intentions were good, this new bill is a fumbled attempt by the Knesset to
direct religious courts toward helping agunot, making the situation worse by
providing the religious courts more power, not less. This is what happens when
religion and state mix.

What is particularly
interesting about [Chief Rabbi Isaac] Herzog’s corpus is the degree to which—in
other responsa—he is conscious of the impact of Israeli statehood on some
elements of conversion law.

Herzog is sensitive
to the difference between his own era and that of the tannaim and the Rambam;
and he is also deeply sensitive to variations among places.

He speaks of the
differences in the worlds of Israel and the Diaspora and, in a number of
situations, even allows those dissimilarities to affect his decisions.

In one
fascinating case, Rabbi Isaac Halevi Herzog, the first Chief Rabbi of the State
of Israel, noted that conversion needs to be undertaken “for the sake of
heaven,” meaning “for no ulterior motive.”

But what
if one wanted to convert specifically so he or she could make aliyah and join
the effort to build a new Jewish state?

In December 1948, he ruled that
in certain cases, converting for the sake of making aliyah was to be considered
a conversion for the sake of heaven.

Here is the voice of a woman raised in the
Jewish community, whose prospective conversion does not entail leaving a
previous religion behind, who presumably has the support of her family – yet
for whom, despite all this, an awareness of Judaism’s conflicting attitudes to
converts is the source of great pain.

Most of Israel’s
boutique wineries were not kosher for many years, as they were established
primarily by secular Israelis whose personal discovery of good wine led them to
begin growing their own grapes, sometimes crushing the grapes in their garage
and then producing and bottling their own wines.

As some of the
wineries grew over time, reaching thousands and then tens of thousands of
bottles per year, they faced a marketing conundrum. The local Israeli market
was generally too small to sell all the bottles, but the export market in
Europe and North America wasn’t all that accepting of Israeli wines.

Jewish
feminist art by women active in the traditional religious world is still a
marginal phenomenon in the general art world and in the Israeli art field in
particular.

This
article, together with the first major exhibit in a museum to exhibit such
work, “Matronita: Jewish Feminist Art” (The Museum of Art Ein Harod), which I
co-curated, invites a reflection on the complexities of the feminist Jewish
religious experience.